1st GraniteI’m just a cook. You want roast Giant Rat brain I’m your dwarf. Wiping out legions of the undead doesn’t fall into my skillset. Yet here I am. Another night of drinking and I wake up with sheaves of paper stacked on me.
My first task was stockpile status. We are set for booze and food.
And we’re really set for plump helmets
I stumbled around the fortress and eventually found Microcline. His report:
“We are surrounded by about 380 undead creatures.”
After some thought I replied “Just undead?”
“Oh no, there’s also three Necromancers cavorting in the southern cliffs.”
I don’t think we can expect much help from the mountain homes
Well first thing’s first, time to halt the production of plump helmets.
3rd GraniteIt appears that we are a fortress that stands strong against the tides of darkness but is to paralyzed with fear to expand or fortify.
5th graniteI’ve decided to test some of the boundaries within which we can build. I’ve been told repeatedly that the dwarves are simply too frightened to build close to the undead, even if they’re out of harm’s reach.
So I’ve instructed the dwarves to try and build up on the Southeast Tower.
8th graniteWhile construction attempts to continue I found Zulban the hunter in the Northwest Tower taking pot shots at a headless corpse. I asked him if he was making any progress on actually killing the undead and his response was to giggle and then shoot off an individual toe of Anirdomi’s partial skeleton. Anirdomi’s severed head is also prancing about up there on the cliffs and gives me the willies.
17th granite Mebzuth the butcher is stricken with melancholy.
27th GraniteA master goblin thief showed up today to snatch children. Too bad he showed up in the middle of the sea of undead. The results were predictable.
11th slate Today I went to look over the machine being built underground. It contains a raised drawbridge and several cages containing captive undead. It appears that when the mechanic is finished you just lock the door, release the cages with one lever, allow the beasts to roam a bit and then pull the other lever. Theoretically this pulverizes them.
We decided to give this a try. I pulled the lever for the cages and indeed the beasts sprang out and began to roam. Unfortunately the mechanisms for the cage release also threw cages and parts under the smasher as well. So much for trying to retain parts.
The machine squished several beasts, but some of the marginally smarter ones have stayed by the western wall. We will simply have to wait.
12th slateStray Wild Boar Sow (Semi-Wild) has forgotten her training! Indeed, she’s starting to look like semi-Wild bacon. The animal trainer seems a bit busy to be trying to re-train the pigs.
16th slatePrevious overseers have made a serious attempt at setting up a trapped entrance in the South Tower. I’ve decided to try it out and see how well it works.
The first things was to raise the zipper bridge ( a marvelous construction). Amusingly a chicken was on it at the time and was flung into the Eastern pit. And they said chickens couldn’t fly.
In preparation for the onslaught I stationed our marks dwarves in the fortifications above the trap bridge and pulled the gate lever…
It did not raise the bridge that it said it would.
A mechanic is now re-doing the lever so that it opens the appropriate gate.
26th SlateI want to open the bridge but that idiot Mebzuth is taking forever to hook up the bridge.
6th FelsiteHuzzah! The Southern bridge is open… The undead are not pouring in as expected. There have got to be at 30 of them lined up.
Though no beasts were trying to come in, a lone marks dwarf, Lolor, decided to make a name for himself and one-shotted an elf corpse. I was impressed.
OOC: First time I’ve ever seen this. Does the recursion continue?
7th FelsiteThe Elf Corpse re-killing catalyzed the hordes and 2 made their way inside quickly becoming caught in the cage traps. We quickly closed the gate hoping to go “harvest” our new captives. But even with the gate closed, the dwarves are too afraid of nearby zombies to change cages. It would appear that the Necromancers have come down from the Southern Cliffs and have started resurrecting yet more corpses on the hill over the Southern Tower. I actually watched one human being resurrected and I must say it was both nauseating and frightening. So now we are not able to work much on the external portion of the South Tower.
17th felsiteWe are being haunted by the ghost of Dorem Shemsanod. We have no history of him so we cannot engrave his memorial. He is currently floating at the highest level of the North Tower.
19th Felsite.Another poor skulking filth has arrived at the wrong time. This little bastard actually managed to escape.
27th FelsiteWe are so fearfully trapped in here that I finally decided that we could at least add another level to the Northern tower. It is beautifully made of Quartzite blocks. But even here, the workers are occasionally spooked by the hordes and find myself having to constantly encourage them to return to work.
I also was inclined to see how close we could get to the cliffs in hopes that perhaps we could place archers to pick off some of the undead causing us problems up there. We did not get very close…
OOC: And that's spring.